A little-known proposal to settle Jewish refugees in Western Australia highlights how different history might have been – and the role of racism in shaping Australia’s decisions.

“I do not like the phrase: ‘It might have been!’ It lacks force, and life’s best truths perverts.”

Setting aside the just sentiments of American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919), it’s worth wondering how different our world would be today if Israel were not in the Middle East, but in northern Western Australia.

Why bother to ask this question? Because it almost happened.

At the end of the 19th century, the hunt for a homeland for Jews persecuted in the Russian Empire, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere was getting serious. Initially, the colonialists focused on farmland in the Americas, particularly in Argentina.

When that idea fizzled, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, founded in London in 1935 by Russian left-wing lawyer Dr Isaac Nachman Steinberg, picked up the quest.

They focused on the Kimberley in WA.

The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews claims the Fraylandists_,_ “aimed to build a secure foundation for the continuity of their socioeconomic life and culture (including the Yiddish language).

“For them, compact, mass colonisation was the only effective means to........

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